Started Early, Took My Dog (36 page)

Once inside he had trouble deciding what to buy. He supposed he should get something for his new acquaintances, the kid had a little backpack but it seemed doubtful it was filled with rations. He bought bottled water, milk and juice, a couple of pasties, apples, a bunch of bananas, a packet of nuts, chocolate, some dog treats and, lastly, a plastic cup of black coffee to take away. The shop was bigger inside than it was outside.

Back in the Saab Jackson waited. He sipped his coffee. Hot and wet and that was about all. It tasted vaguely of rust. He opened the packet of nuts and threw a handful in his mouth. He heard a train somewhere, muffled by the fog, and wondered where it was going. A cow bellowed nearby, low and moody, like a foghorn. It was at times like this that he felt like taking up smoking again. He waited some more. He wondered if he should go and see if the pair of them were OK. Perhaps there had been some kind of emotional breakdown in the toilets.

He watched as the girl in the garage came out from her sanctum and started hauling the buckets of flowers and bags of smokeless fuel out front. Whatever they were paying her, he thought, it didn’t seem like enough. She paused on the threshold, clutching a plastic bucket of flowers that were already tired inside their cellophane shrouds, the same kind of weedy-looking bouquets that were propped against trees or stuck through wire fencing to indicate where some unfortunate cyclist or pedestrian had been knocked off the planet. A rotting pile had been left at the site of the train crash. Someone had shown him a photograph later. The bouquets had been placed at the bridge above the track. Kitsch-looking soft toys and teddy bears too.

’Twas just this time, last year, I died
. Two years to be accurate. For some reason Schrödinger’s cat popped into his mind. ‘Both alive and dead at the same time,’ Julia said. That had been Jackson after the train crash. ‘Neither one thing nor t’other,’ his brother would have said.

The girl from the garage cast a suspicious glance in Jackson’s direction but then her attention was drawn away from him as a black Land Cruiser suddenly appeared out of the fog, slowing to a stop on the other side of the forecourt. It waited with the engine running, looking vaguely menacing, like a pent-up bull waiting to go into the ring. Before Jackson could form much of a thought about it (such as what a stupid, badass kind of vehicle, who do they think they are, warlords, gangsters?), a man – a cross-bred species, half rugby fullback, half silverback gorilla – climbed out of the passenger side and also made his way round the back.

The driver then climbed out of the Land Cruiser and started to approach the Saab. Brothers-in-arms. Both men had the doughy faces of people reared on a diet of fat and potatoes and were dressed in leather jackets that had last been fashionable some time in the seventies, unless you lived in Albania where they had never become démodé and possibly never would.

Before he reached the Saab the woman reappeared, screaming her head off at Jackson. She lumbered across the forecourt like a charging rhino, carrying the girl under one arm while with her free hand she was struggling to remove the bag that was strapped across her front. The silverback gorilla was on her heels but not for long because she managed to pull the bag over her head and, holding it by the strap at arm’s length, in one surprisingly graceful movement – more ballet than hammer throw, the kid under her arm forming a kind of ballast – she twirled round and socked the guy following her full in the face with the bag. He went down like lead. Jackson flinched inwardly and wondered what a woman would carry in a handbag that could do that kind of damage. An anvil? Thatcher would have liked a handbag like that.

The driver of the Land Cruiser changed trajectory and started heading towards the woman. Jackson was halfway out of the car, intending to head him off, but the woman yelled and gestured at him to get back in the Saab. He did, surprised at his own obedience to her barking parade-ground tones.

The girl from the garage, ignorant of the ruckus that was developing, stepped out uncertainly on to the forecourt, holding a bucket of tulips. Unfortunately the driver of the Land Cruiser, running towards the Saab as if he was heading for the try-line, failed to swerve in time and sent the girl flying across the concrete, tulips spilling everywhere. It put the driver off his stride long enough for the woman to fling the kid in the back seat of the Saab and lunge in after her, bellowing at Jackson, ‘Drive, drive! Just fucking drive, will you?’

Again, obedient to orders.

In the rear-view mirror he could see the girl still sprawled motionless on the ground. She would be lucky if something wasn’t broken. Like her head, for example. He could make out the shape of the guy who had been handbagged, still out cold on the ground, but then everything behind them was swallowed by the fog. He cast a glance over his shoulder and saw that the woman had pulled the kid down on to the floor of the car and was snailed protectively over her body. Did she think they had guns? When there were guns around, Jackson preferred being inside a vehicle that was armoured and official rather than a thin-skinned family saloon, manufactured in a neutral country.

Domestic abuse didn’t quite seem to fit the bill any more.

‘Who were those goons?’

‘I haven’t got the faintest idea,’ she said.

‘They seemed to be after you.’

‘Looked like it,’ she said.

Jackson was still on adrenalin overload but the other occupants of the car appeared imperturbable. In the footwell, the dog remained determinedly asleep. Jackson was pretty sure it was pretending. How long before it regretted its choice of new pack leader? The kid also had a pretty good poker face on her and his Amazonian hitchhiker was raking through her bag as if finding a lipstick or a tissue was more interesting than contemplating the carnage in their wake. They had made an attempt to clean themselves up a bit in the garage toilets. He noticed that the woman no longer had blood on her hands. Jackson felt there might be a metaphor hiding in there somewhere.

He thought of the guy she had smacked with her handbag, laid out cold on the concrete.
Frailty, thy name is woman!

‘What have you
got
in that bag?’ he asked. Me and the cat, he thought, helplessly curious.

She removed a big black Maglite and displayed it for his appreciation in the rear-view mirror. It looked like old police issue. They weighed a ton, no wonder the guy hadn’t bounced back up again. She was taking no prisoners, that was for sure. She replaced the Maglite and returned to delving in the bag, finally coming up with a mobile phone. Jackson assumed that she was going to phone in the incident at the garage.

‘Are you phoning the police?’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ she said and promptly rolled down the window and threw the phone out of it. He turned round and looked at her.

‘What?’ she said.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked when Jackson took his own phone out of his pocket. Another chippy woman, Jackson thought with a sigh. Chippy women wherever he went. Chippy mothers who begat chippy daughters and so the circle of chippiness was unbroken.

‘Phoning 999.’

‘Why?’

‘The girl in the garage,’ he said, with exaggerated forbearance. ‘An innocent bystander,’ he added, thinking of the tulips, the primary coloured spearheads scattered across the forecourt.

‘Innocent bystander?’ the woman said. ‘What innocent bystander? Is anyone really innocent?’

‘Kids? Dogs?’ Jackson offered. ‘Me?’

She snorted derisively in the way that a woman married to him ten years might have done.

‘I get it, you don’t want to involve the police,’ he said. ‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’

‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘And anyway, is anyone really a
bystander
?’ she mused as if they were in the middle of a philosophical debate. ‘You could argue that we’re all bystanders.’

‘It’s not a case of semantics,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ve just left that girl and I would say, yes, “innocent” and “bystander” pretty much cover her role in the proceedings.’

‘Semantics,’ she murmured. ‘Big word for this time of day.’

Your average upstanding citizen tended to phone for the emergency services in these circumstances. Fugitive, criminal, woman with a lethal handbag, what was her story? Jackson sighed. ‘Seeing as I appear to be helping you escape from something that seems pretty dodgy, to say the least, can I take it on trust that you’re on the side of good?’

‘Good?’

‘As in the opposite of bad.’

‘Because I’m a woman? A woman with a child? Doesn’t always follow.’

The child in question was now asleep. The silver wand, no longer really fit for purpose, had finally slipped from her slack fingers. He hoped this wasn’t a routine kind of day for her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Because you said you were police.’

‘Again, doesn’t always follow,’ she said with a shrug.

‘I’m still going to phone it in.’ He half expected her to knock him out with the Maglite but at that moment the kid woke up and said, ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Got any bananas in there?’

‘It just so happens,’ he said, producing a bunch from the plastic carrier bag on the passenger seat. Like a magician. Or a fool. He was a cocky so-and-so. Was he really ex-police? He seemed a bit on the wimpy side, the sort that liked to rescue damsels in distress but not if it involved too much hardship. He was quite attractive, she’d give him that, but that was possibly the last thing on Tracy’s mind. Dodging and weaving to escape mysterious men who were chasing you could do that to a woman. Being a woman could do that to a woman. He had a silly little dog, you had to wonder what attracted a man to an animal that size.

‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said.

‘No you don’t,’ Tracy agreed.

‘Banana? Apple? Dog treat?’ he offered. The girl took an apple. ‘Would Mummy like something?’ Jackson said, looking at Tracy in the rear-view mirror.

‘She’s not my mummy,’ the kid said, matter-of-factly. Little kick to Tracy’s heart.

‘The things kids say,’ she said, returning his gaze in the mirror. ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to have an accident. You’ve got a fairy on board.’

Who were those guys back at the garage? A pair of leather jacketed thugs working in tandem, but for who and why? The first one had banged open the door of the toilets while the kid was washing her hands. He opened his mouth to say something but before he could spit anything out Tracy kneed him hard where it hurt the most. And ran. Someone wanted that kid back, didn’t they? And it wasn’t Kelly Cross, she didn’t want anything any more. Would never want anything ever again.

The Saab driver dialled 999 while driving, phoned it in anonymously, reporting an ‘incident’, made it sound serious. He came across as a professional rather than – his pet obsession, it seemed – an ‘innocent bystander’. ‘Send an ambulance,’ he said authoritatively.

‘Using a mobile phone while driving,’ Tracy said when Jackson finished the call. ‘That’s a crime right there.’

‘Arrest me,’ he said.

Her own phone had been like a beacon, flashing her identity out to anyone who might be looking for her. Anyone could find you if you had a mobile. A woman on the run with a kidnapped kid shouldn’t be advertising herself. She had thrown the phone out of the car window. They were outlaws now.

They were on roads that weren’t familiar to her, places that meant nothing – Beckhole, Egton Grange, Goathland – but then signs began to appear for the coast. Tracy didn’t really want to go to the coast, she wanted to get to the holiday cottage. She could see that there was an argument to be made for staying with this man. Without him she was a lone woman on the run with a kid who didn’t belong to her. Together they were a family. Or something that resembled a family to anyone looking for them. Tracy contemplated sticking with him a bit longer, dismissed the idea. She reached over and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Pit-stop again, I’m afraid,’ she said ruefully.

He drew to a halt. They were in the middle of nowhere. Tracy liked the middle of nowhere better than the middle of somewhere.

‘That dog could probably do with getting out as well,’ she reminded him. ‘Stretch its legs, powder its nose.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you’re probably right.’

They all climbed out of the car. Tracy moved a short distance away to a discreet little limestone outcrop hillock. ‘I’m not needing,’ Courtney whispered to her.

‘Good,’ Tracy said, watching the dog bounding off into the heather, the man following it. All Tracy needed was for him to be further away from the car than she was. And to be slower to react. And on the whole to be more stupid. Turned out he was all of those things. She seized the kid’s hand and said, ‘Come on, quickly. Get back into the car.’

The fog was their friend again. Before the Saab driver knew what was happening Courtney had scrambled into the back seat and buckled herself in. You had to hand it to the kid, she was pretty good at the old fast exit. Tracy got in the driving seat and turned the ignition. Within seconds they were half a mile further down the road than Jackson Brodie.

His phone was on the passenger seat. Tracy slowed down and threw it out of the car on to the verge.

A hundred yards further along the road Courtney said, ‘He left his bag.’

Tracy stopped this time and hauled the rucksack over to the front seat, opened her door and threw it out.

‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ she said.